The reasons why 64-bit programs require more stack memory

In this post, I will speak about the stack and in future I plan to discuss memory allocation and binary code’s size.

In forums, people often say that 64-bit versions of programs consume a larger amount of memory and stack. Saying so, they usually argue that the sizes of data have become twice larger. But this statement is unfounded since the size of most types (char, short, int, float) in the C/C++ language remain the same on 64-bit systems. Of course, for instance, the size of a pointer has increased but far not all the data in a program consist of pointers. The reasons why the memory amount consumed by programs has increased are more complex. I decided to investigate this issue in detail.

In this post, I will speak about the stack and in future I plan to discuss memory allocation and binary code’s size. And I would like also to note right away that the article covers the language C/C++ and Microsoft Visual Studio development environment.

Until recently, I believed that the code of a 64-bit application cannot consume the stack quicker than twice in comparison to 32-bit code. Relying on this assumption, in my articles, I recommended to increase the program stack two times just in case. But now I have explored an unpleasant thing: stack consumption might grow much higher than twice. I was astonished since I considered the stack growth of two times the worst-case scenario. The reason of my unfounded hopes will become clear a bit later. But now let’s see how parameters are passed in a 64-bit program when calling functions.

When developing calling conventions for the x86-64 architecture, they decided to bring an end to various versions of function calls. In Win32there was a wide range of calling conventions: stdcall, cdecl, fastcall, thiscall, etc. In Win64, there is only one “native” calling convention. Modifiers like __cdecl are ignored by the compiler. I think everybody agrees that such an axe of calling conventions is noble.

The calling convention on the x86-64 platform resembles the fastcall convention existing in x86. In the x64-convention, the first four integer arguments (left to right) are passed in 64-bit registers chosen specially for this purpose:

RCX: the 1st integer argument

RDX: the 2nd integer argument

R8: the 3rd integer argument

R9: the 4th integer argument

The rest of the integer arguments are passed through the stack. The pointer “this” is considered an integer argument, so it is always placed into the RCX register. If floating-point values are passed, the first four of them are passed in the registers XMM0-XMM3 while all the next are passed through the stack.

Relying on this information, I concluded that a 64-bit program can in many cases save the stack memory unlike a 32-bit one. For if parameters are passed through registers and the code of the function is brief and there is no need to save the arguments in the memory (stack), then the size of the stack memory being consumed must be smaller. But it is not so.

Although arguments can be passed in registers, the compiler all the same reserves some space for them in the stack by reducing the value of the RSP register (the stack pointer). Each function must reserve at least 32 bytes (four 64-bit values corresponding to the registers RCX, RDX, R8, R9) in the stack. This space in the stack allows to easily save the contents of the registers passed into the function in the stack. The function being called is not required to save input parameters passed through the registers into the stack but reserving space in the stack allows to do this if necessary. If more than four integer parameters are passed, some additional space must be reserved in the stack.

Let’s consider an example. Some function passes two integer parameters to a child function. The compiler places the arguments’ values into the registers RCX and RDX and meanwhile subtracts 32 bytes from the RSP register. The function being called can address the parameters through the registers RCX and RDX. If the code of this function needs these registers for some purpose, it can copy their contents into the reserved space in the stack with the size 32 bytes.

The described feature leads to a significant growth of the stack consumption speed. Even if the function does not have parameters, 32 bytes will be “bit off” the stack anyway and they will not be used anyhow then. I failed to find the reason for such a wasteful mechanism. There were some explanations concerning unification and simplification of debugging but this information was too vague.

Note another thing. The stack pointer RSP must be aligned on a 16-byte boundary before a next function call. Thus, the total size of the stack being used when calling a function without parameters in 64-bit code is: 8 (the return address) + 8 (alignment) + 32 (reserved space for arguments) = 48 bytes!

Let’s see what it might cause in practice. Here and further, I will use Visual Studio 2010 for my experiments. Let’s make a recursive function like this:

The function is deliberately a bit confused to prevent the optimizer from turning it into “nothing”. The main thing here is: the function has an argument of the pointer type and one local variable, also pointer-type. Let’s see how much stack is consumed by the function in the 32-bit and 64-bit versions and how many times it can be recursively called when the stack’s size is 1 Mbyte (the size by default).

Release 32-bit: the last displayed number (stack depth) - 51331

The compiler uses 20 bytes when calling this function.

Release 64-bit: the last displayed number - 21288

The compiler uses 48 bytes when calling this function.

Thus, the 64-bit version of the StackUse function is more than twice voracious than the 32-bit one.

Note that changing of data alignment rules might also influence the size of consumed stack. Let’s assume that the function takes the following structure as an argument:

struct S
{
char a;
size_t b;
char c;
};
void StackUse(S s) { ... }

The size of the ‘S’ structure increases from 12 bytes to 24 bytes when being recompiled in the 64-bit version due to changes of alignment rules and change of the ‘b’ member’s size. The structure is passed into the function by the value. And, correspondingly, the structure will also take twice more memory in the stack.

Can it all be so bad? No. Do not forget that the 64-bit compiler can handle more registers than the 32-bit one. Let’s complicate the experiment function’s code:

The 64-bit compiler managed to use additional registers for this sample and build a more efficient code allowing us to reduce the amount of the stack memory being consumed!

Conclusions

One cannot foresee how much stack memory a 64-bit version of a program will consume in comparison to a 32-bit one. It might be both less (unlikely) and much more.

For a 64-bit program, you should increase the amount of reserved stack 2-3 times. 3 times is better - just to feel at ease. To do this, see the parameter Stack Reserve Size (the /STACK:reserve switch) in project settings. By default the stack’s size is 1 Mbyte.

You should not worry if your 64-bit program consumes more stack memory. There is much more physical memory in 64-bit systems. The stack with the size 2 Mbytes on a 64-bit system with 8 Gbytes of memory takes fewer percent of memory than 1 Mbyte of stack in a 32-bit system with 2 Gbytes.